“We are the legacy of the purity movement,
the people who grew up in it,
who grapple with its impacts every day.”
As a Christian teenager growing up
in the Midwest in the 1990s, Linda Kay Klein got swept up
in the emerging purity movement,
which advocated strict sexual abstinence until marriage.
“It had, in fact, started right around the time
that I joined my youth group as a seventh grader.
This movement saturated the lives of evangelicals,
but that was really just the beginning.
It entered into public schools,
it entered into grassroots organizations.”
“Sex is a great thing within marriage.”
“Our country started to shift the way
that we talked about sexuality.
The purity movement introduced a purity industry,
with purity rings and purity pledges and purity balls.”
“A new ritual aimed at encouraging girls
and young women to abstain from sex until marriage.”
“I am living my life the way
that I think it should be lived, and that's, um, staying pure, so.”
“They're actually purity rings,
and they're promises to ourselves and to God
that we'll stay pure until marriage.”
But before purity made its way
into pop culture, evangelical Christian teens
like Joshua Harris often found themselves at odds
with the world they were living in.
“You had the culture pushing the envelope
in different ways when it came to sex.
Like, my generation growing up,
like MTV for Christians was like, oh my gosh, you know,
all these terrible things that are happening
in these music videos and so on.
So there's a reaction in the, in the Christian culture to that.”
“The campaign is called ‘True Love Waits’
and it's sponsored by the Baptist Sunday School Board.”
“Thousands of teenagers are vowing
to be something that most teens are not:
virgins until they are married.”
“I make a commitment to God.”
“To those I date.”
At the time, fear over the spread of AIDS
only bolstered the argument for abstinence above all else.
“Stace and I don't have to worry about S.T.D.s
or contracting AIDS or having an unwanted pregnancy.”
“You kind of have this sense of, I'm going to choose
the more difficult path and do the right thing,
and God is happier with me because of that.
It's kind of like the Christian form of veganism
or whatever, you know, it's like I’m, I’m special.
I’m doing something different than everybody else.”
By the time he was a teenager,
Harris was becoming a leader among his peers.
“I remember going out to Washington D.C.,
and there was a huge Christian concert/festival
that was taking place.
And they placed all of these promise cards on the Mall.”
“Teenagers signed cards pledging their virginity
and planted 200,000 of the cards,
creating a field of abstinence.”
[shouting] “Woo! True love waits.
Wait until you get married. Woo!”
Rallies promoting purity were held
across the U.S., and Klein, who became enthralled
with evangelicalism growing up,
still remembers the fervor of one she attended.
“We were all, like, this is the biggest,
best concert we've ever been to.
And then there was a motivational speaker
who spoke about purity and how important purity was.
And in the midst of that with tears rolling
down people's faces, they handed out these contracts.
I promise that I will save my purity for my partner.
I will not have sex before marriage.
Uh, I'm making this commitment today and I will hold to it
for the rest of my life.
As a young person, I was confused
and wanted so badly to be good
and wanted so badly to please God
and to be acceptable in my community.
With my leaders looking over my shoulder
and moreover my peers sitting right next to me
signing their contracts, I signed the pledge.”
[shouting] “I want to know,
how many virgins do we have out there?”
“Woo!”
“When I embraced my faith,
I wanted to figure out what did it mean to be a Christian
and relate to the opposite sex, to think about sexuality.”
Harris, who had come close to having sex at 17,
doubled down on his resolve afterwards.
“I ended up becoming really a spokesperson
for these more radical ideas of saying
we should not only save sex for marriage,
but we should do dating differently.
We should reject dating
because it's leading us towards compromise.”
“Do you see the problem with so many
of our dating relationships today?
Instead of guarding the sacredness of sexual intimacy,
we are stealing from it.”
“If you're, uh, an alcoholic, don't go into a bar.
You know? It was like, if you don't want to have sex,
then don't get into these sort of short-term
romantic relationships where there's an expectation
to become intimate.”
“Harris's book, ‘I Kissed Dating Goodbye,’
went on to sell over a million copies.
And as he and others pushed for purity,
another more insidious message took root.”
“Well, ladies, I believe you also have a unique opportunity
to protect the purity of your brothers in the Lord.
What I think you probably are not aware of is
how difficult it is for a guy to look at a girl
with purity in his heart when she is dressed immodestly.
You have no idea how difficult it is.
You have no idea.”
“I remember feeling like I was a threat,
and I remember feeling like I was a bad person.
My sexuality was dangerous.
It was something to be feared.
The narrative that we've internalized is that pure girls
and women protect us all.
They ensure by their proper covering up,
by their not taking up too much space,
whatever it is, then none of us are going
to have sexual thoughts and feelings.”
Klein had left evangelicalism
by the time she was 21, but she continued
to struggle for years afterward.
“When I would have any sexual experience with my boyfriend,
I would find myself in tears and in a ball
in the corner of a bed, crying. My eczema coming out,
which it does when I'm stressed,
and scratching myself until I bled
and having a deep shame reaction.
I could actually be this close to doing something
that if they were right, if the purity movement was right,
would make me worthless.”
Klein began reaching out to friends from home,
and then over the next 15 years
to other people around the country, collecting their stories
about growing up in the purity movement.
She published a book on the topic in 2018.
And up until the pandemic hit,
kept hearing new stories all the time
from people she met at her book events.
“This all feels really new to me.
Like, it wasn't until a few months ago
that my therapist brought up the concept
of purity culture to me.
And I didn't even know what that was,
but I realized I was raised in it,
and that led me to finding your book.
And when I read it, I kind of cried
through the whole thing because it now makes
so much sense why I have this trauma that I carry
and why it's not going away.”
“They had word for word been taught the same things
that we were taught and were experiencing it
in their bodies in the same ways
that we were experiencing it.
Once that happened, not three times, not four times,
but 30 times, 40 times, I started to be like,
O.K., this is obviously much bigger than me.
This is obviously much bigger than my youth group.
This is much bigger than my state.”
During Klein's conversations,
one name kept coming up: Joshua Harris.
Harris had gone on to become a pastor,
but in recent years was starting
to question his leadership role and quit in 2015
to enroll in graduate school for theology.
Soon, he was also beginning
to re-examine the messages of his book.
“It was something that had given me a sense
of success and personal identity.
And so to question that felt
like I was kind of unraveling myself, honestly.
I remember one key moment that kind of tipped this
into the public sphere, was that a woman
on Twitter wrote, ‘your book was used
against me like a weapon.’
And I responded to her saying, I’m so sorry.”
“Whoa, that changed everything, right?
All of a sudden people were, like, what did you say?
Did you say you were sorry for something?
So now we had this huge slew of people who were tweeting,
I was hurt by this, I was hurt by this,
I was hurt by this, I was hurt by this.
You had all these different conversations going on
and they are really about people coming together
and healing in a collective experience.”
Harris, meanwhile, decided to engage
with his critics in person
and made a film about the process.
“I've looked into the eyes of people
who said, this created fear in me,
this created intense shame and guilt for me.
And your book was kind of in my head
and shaped the way that I viewed myself.”
Harris, who pulled his book from publication,
faced some criticism that the film didn't go far enough.
He's since issued more apologies.
In 2019, he announced his separation from his wife
and that he no longer considers himself a Christian.
“The process of unpublishing my books
is a pretty big statement of, of regret for me.
It doesn't make up for, or fix the, the past hurt.
I, I want to try to take responsibility for that.”
Klein has continued coaching others,
as they work through their own experiences.
“I like held hands with a boy when I was 14 and cried,
like, you know, felt really impure.”
“The unintended consequences is
what we're really dealing with today.”
“Made no sense to me.
I didn't know why I was physically shaking,
why I would burst into tears, why I would cower
in the corner, why all these things were happening to me.”
“Some things that we put out there don't work,
but they don't do damage either.
This is something that didn't work,
and that has caused a tremendous amount of damage.”
“It's not about taking big steps.
It's about taking these little steps.
Teach your brain to function differently
by, like, trying to do just enough where you're not triggering
a huge shame response that reiterates
that old neural pathway.
Is that helpful?”
“I think that change is going to happen when we have people
on the ground coming into voice with one another
and telling their truths to one another.
We'll all continue to learn.
And that's the real work.”
(melodic music)